ဧရာဝတီမွာ ေက်ာ္စြာမိုုးနဲ႔ေျပာျဖစ္တာ

Battered Burma’s unanswered question: when will the fighting end?

The horrors of war are all too visible on Myo Myint’s scarred body. The former Burma Army trooper has only one arm and one leg. The fingers of one hand are just stumps, he’s almost blind in one eye and pieces of landmine shrapnel still lodge in his body.

Myo Myint is one of countless thousands of men and women maimed for life in Burma’s ongoing civil war, which has been raging for more than half a century—one of Asia’s longest unsolved conflicts.

The story of Myo Myint’s fate vividly reflects his country’s own suffering and its decline from relative prosperity and health to its present status as one of the world’s poorest countries.

When Burma gained independence in 1948 it was among Asia’s most promising emergent democracies, with a potentially highly successful economy.

More than 50 years of civil war and misgovernment have turned Burma into a beggar state.

Exact statistics of the civil war’s dead and injured are unknown, but the author Martin Smith says in his book ‘Burma: Insurgency And The Politics of Ethnicity’, updated in 1999: “A figure of about 10,000 deaths a year nationwide from the insurgencies over the last five decades is probably fairly accurate, though with some much higher annual fluctuations.”

Fifteen years previously, according to Smith, the junta’s late leader, Gen Saw Maung, predecessor of Snr-Gen Than Shwe, said pensions were being paid to 28,000 dependants of soldiers killed in action since 1953 and to 40,000 disabled veterans.

Burma’s civil war between government forces and insurgent groups began soon after the country gained its independence from Britain in January 1948.

Two months after independence the Communist Party of Burma took up arms and the following year the Karen National Union, or KNU, followed. Other ethnic groups, including Arakan, Mon and Karenni, went underground. Most armed groups demanded territorial independence or autonomy, and the worst of the fighting has concentrated itself in remote ethnic areas bordering Thailand, China and India.

Myo Myint, 42, received nothing for the wounds he suffered fighting for the Burma Army in 1983 against communist insurgents in northern Shan State.

He joined up in 1979, at the age of 16, after failing his matriculation exam. “Ignorance and disillusionment pushed me into becoming a soldier, like many others.”

His army experiences made Myo Myint an outspoken activist for peace. “Who is winning this war?” he asks. “One certainty is that we—soldiers on both sides, their families and civilians—are losers.”

In 1989, three years after his retirement from army service, Myo Myint joined the National League for Democracy, saying he believed the opposition party could end the civil war. He says he met NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi and discussed with her the prospects for peace.

In the same year he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years for associating with the outlawed Communist Party. He was freed after serving seven years but then rearrested for allegedly secretly passing information to political prisoners.

This time he was sentenced to serve seven years.

 He readily admits his involvement with the now-defunct Communist Party and participating in its underground activities, but he says he was motivated by democratic aims.

In February this year he fled to neighboring Thailand for fear of being arrested again.

Two years spent in hospital in the early 1980s, being treated for his war wounds, gave him time to read and meditate about war.

“I realized that we were atrociously killing each other without any reason or hatred,” he says.

“I came to recognize an unreasonable cycle where we kill because they, the enemy, are killing us, and they kill us because we are killing them,” the ex-soldier says. “It’s different for those in power. For them, war is power.”

Myo Myint recalled Burma Army sorties where soldiers destroyed whole villages suspected of sheltering enemy forces. Civilian casualties were high, but numbers dropped after the Communist Party collapsed in 1989 and ceasefire agreements were reached with various ethnic groups.

Other groups, including the KNU, the Shan State Army-South and the Karenni National Progressive Party, haven’t abandoned their armed struggles, and border clashes continue.

“We need to build a genuine peace process to end this civil war,” says Myo Myint. He believes the country needs a peace group like Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing’s Internal Peace Committee, which was banned by the Ne Win regime in 1969.

Kodaw Hmaing was a widely respected veteran of the post-colonial nationalist movement, and arranged peace talks between the government and insurgent groups in the 1960s.

The talks yielded nothing, however.

A troop of Karen soldiers leaving Manerplaw in 1991

Theories abound that after taking power in 1962 Ne Win and his ruling clique deliberately fuelled the civil war as a policy move to encourage the population to believe that a strong military was necessary to maintain order.

A retired Burma Army lieutenant colonel told The Irrawaddy in a phone interview from Rangoon that Ne Win and some of his generals might indeed have maintained that kind of secret policy until they lost power in 1988. But he didn’t think the current military government still exercised such a policy.

Myo Myint points out that many soldiers took part in the nationwide 1988 pro-democracy uprising. Hundreds participated in the Mingaladon Township where he had been living.

In the 1990 elections, the NLD won big support in Mingaladon, which has a large population of military personnel and their families.

Large numbers of activists, some soldiers among them, fled to border areas following the suppression of the 1988 uprisings and the post-election crackdowns. In the early 1990s, government forces staged all-out assaults on ethnic camps and armed centers of opposition.

In two months of 1992 about 4,000 died in Burma Army attacks on KNU camps in the southeast. The KNU headquarters at Manerplaw fell to a sustained assault by 30,000 government troops.

Padoh Mahn Sha, secretary general of the KNU, estimates that since his movement began its struggle in 1949, tens of thousands of Karen soldiers have died in battle.

The All Burma Students’ Democratic Front secretary Kyaw Ko also says that more than 1,200 members have been killed or injured in the critical years 1988 to 2004.

There’s an additional cost in human misery: tens of thousands of Karen people in villages near the battle zones have fled to Thailand, while thousands more were displaced within Burma, giving rise to a new designation in the catalogue of refugee categories: IDP, or internally displaced person.

Htay Aung, a former member of the ABSDF and now in charge of the research department of the Network for Democracy and Development, estimates that more than five decades of civil war have cost up to one million lives—a number mentioned by the junta’s former leader Saw Maung.

Scarred and crippled, Myo Myint has pledged his remaining energy to working for an end to the bloodshed and suffering. “I just want to stop mothers like mine crying for their sons.”

The Death That Lurks Beneath the Ground

“I never shot a single enemy with a gun,” says Myo Myint laconically. “But mines I planted would have claimed many lives.”

Myo Myint laid mines for the Burma Army in northern Shan State in the early 1980s, carrying away with him hideous wounds and vivid memories.

“I can still see in my mind one incident when I detonated a kind of bouncing mine, cutting down about 20 soldiers like banana trees felled by a knife,” he recalls.

Ironically, Myo Myint himself fell victim while monitoring one of his own landmine fields. He lost an arm and a leg and suffered other serious injuries when an enemy rocket hit a patch of mines.

Myo Myint and a fellow soldier were in charge of a huge mine field of about 30,000 landmines in an outpost in Shan State where Burma Army forces were locked in battle with troops of the Communist Party of Burma.

Their minefield was typical of hundreds sown throughout large tracts of Burma during more than 50 years of conflict between government forces and insurgent groups.

any of them continue to take a heavy toll, among soldiers and civilians alike.

According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, mines are to be found in nine of 14 states and divisions of Burma. Karen State is the most heavily mined region.

International mine research groups estimate that about 1,500 people are killed or injured annually by landmines in Burma, although the true number is thought to be much higher. The grisly toll puts Burma high up in the list of countries where landmines are still killing people.

The ICBL reported last year that Burma is one of a few countries that are still using landmines in conflicts with their own insurgencies and that the military government still refuses to sign treaties banning their use. The report said that the Rangoon government and at least 15 rebel groups are using landmines.

According to Myo Myint, troops tend to plant abandoned mines around their outposts, as well as whole minefields in areas of conflict. When the troops move on they don’t bother to defuse the mines, which kill and maim local villagers.

Last month, at least two civilians in Kayah State fell victims to abandoned landmines. Saw Lwin, a 36-year-old civilian, died when his vehicle detonated a mine near the capital, Loikaw, while a 20-year-old companion, Saw Lu Moo, was seriously injured.

The Karenni Nationalities People’s Liberation Front and the Karenni National Progressive Party accused each other of planting the mine.

KNPLF official said at least 10 landmines had exploded recently in the area, causing mostly civilian casualties.

Some international organizations have reported that Rangoon government forces use civilians—especially prisoners—as “human minesweepers,” forcing them to walk ahead of the troops and clear minefields.

Myo Myint didn’t witness any such incidents while serving with the Burma Army, but he believed that prisoners or porters were being employed in this way. — Kyaw Zwa Moe